I’ve make this point in work Slack a few times. Carson Gross says it better though:
Some people say that the move from high level languages to AI-generated code is like the move from assembly to high level programming languages.
I do not agree with this simile.
Compilers are, for the most part, deterministic in a way that current AI tools are not. Given a high-level programming language construct such as a for loop or if statement, you can, with reasonable certainty, say what the generated assembly will look like for a given computer architecture (at least pre-optimization).
The same cannot be said for an LLM-based solution to a particular prompt.
I think it goes a bit deeper than determinism, however. In some way, high-level , assembly and machine code are merely alternate representations of the same thing. They encode the same information. If the CPU could directly run Rust code, the same thing should happen as when it runs the compiled machine code.
Compilation is translation that, at best, preserves existing information; it may even discard some. In contrast, LLM’s create new information from their inputs. Lots of it. This is what makes probabilistic generation a very different beast to deterministic compilation of a high-level language.
I can see where the simile comes from — “human language is a higher level of abstraction” — but it’s not simply a higher level of abstraction. It is a completely new mechanism to create programs. Instead of translation, it’s generation.
Code produced today will differ from code produced yesterday for the exact same prompt and model. And that non-determinism is the essential aspect of the LLM paradigm; it gives the approach its excitement, its power and its weakness.
This is why we don’t know what to do with it. If it was merely a higher level abstraction, well, we’ve done that a hundred times before.